Friday, March 31, 2017

Blaming Russia for Everything

Exclusive: The Senate
Intelligence Committee launched its Russia-gate investigation by inviting some
“experts” in to rant about how everything that goes wrong in the United States
is the fault of the Russians, observes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

It’s almost getting comical
how everything that happens in the United States gets blamed on Russia! Russia!
Russia! And, if any American points out the absurdity of this argument, he or
she must be a “Moscow stooge” or a “Putin puppet.”

When Sen. Marco Rubio’s
presidential campaign fails seemingly because he was a wet-behind-the-ears
candidate who performed like a robot during debates repeating the same talking
points over and over, you might have cited those shortcomings to explain why “Little
Marco” flamed out. However, if you did, that would make you a Russian “useful
idiot”! The “real” reason for his failure, as we learned from Thursday’s Senate
Intelligence Committee hearing, was Russia!

When Americans turned against
President Obama’s Pacific trade deals, you might have thought that it was
because people across the country had grown sick and tired of these neoliberal
agreements that have left large swaths of the country deindustrialized and
former blue-collar workers turning to opioids and alcohol. But if you did think
that, that would mean you are a dupe of the clever Russkies, as ex-British
spy Christopher
Steele made clear in one of his “oppo” research reports against Donald
Trump. As Steele’s dossier explained, the rejection of Obama’s TPP and TTIP
trade deals resulted from Russian propaganda!

When Hillary Clinton boots a
presidential election that was literally hers to lose, you might have thought
that she lost because she insisted on channeling her State Department emails
through a private server that endangered national security; that she gave paid
speeches to Wall Street and tried to hide the contents from the voters; that
she called half of Donald Trump’s supporters “deplorables”; that she was a
widely disliked establishment candidate in an anti-establishment year; that she
was shoved down the throats of progressive Democrats by a Democratic Party
hierarchy that made her nomination “inevitable” via the undemocratic use of
unelected “super-delegates”; that some of her State Department emails were
found on the laptop of suspected sex offender Anthony Weiner (the husband of
Clinton’s close aide Huma Abedin); and that the laptop discovery caused FBI
Director James Comey to briefly reopen the investigation of Clinton’s private
email server in the last days of the campaign.

You might even recall that
Clinton herself blamed her late collapse in the polls on Comey’s announcement,
as did other liberal luminaries such as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.
But if you thought those thoughts or remembered those memories, that is just
more proof that you are a “Russian mole”!

As we all should know in our
properly restructured memory banks and our rearranged sense of reality, it was
all Russia’s fault! Russia did it by undermining our democratic process through
the clever means of releasing truthful information via WikiLeaks that provided
evidence of how the Democratic National Committee rigged the nomination process
against Sen. Bernie Sanders, revealed the contents of Clinton’s hidden Wall
Street speeches, and exposed pay-to-play features of the Clinton Foundation in
its dealings with foreign entities.

You see the evil Russians
undermined American democracy by arming the American people with truthful
information! How dastardly is that! Could Boris and Natasha do any better or
worse? And although the Soviet spies in FX’s “The Americans” were in their prime
in the 1980s and would be pretty old by now, do we know where they are in the
present day? Though WikiLeaks denies getting the two batches of emails – the
DNC’s and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s – from the Russians, have we
ruled out that the emails might have been slipped to WikiLeaks by the FX
characters Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, presumably in disguise?

Oddly, too, when similar
factual revelations come from Western-favored leaks, such as the purloined
financial records of a Panamanian law firm known as the “Panama Papers,” we
hail the disclosures regardless of the dubious methods that were used to steal
them, especially if the contents can be spun to undermine disfavored
governments like Russia (while also inconveniently embarrassing a few
unimportant “’allies”).

But if you make that
comparison or you note how the U.S. Agency for International Development and
the U.S. government-funded National Endowment for Democracy have supported
various “independent” journalists and news outlets to advance U.S. propaganda,
that makes you guilty of “moral equivalence,” another serious offense.

Crazy Talk

So now that you know how the
game is played, you had the Senate Intelligence Committee eliciting testimony
from people like media watcher Clint Watts, who seems to believe that any
criticism of a U.S. government official (at least anyone he likes) must be
directed by Russia!

“This past week we observed
social media accounts discrediting U.S. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan,” said
Watts, who is
billed in The Washington Post as “an expert in terrorism forecasting
and Russian influence operations.”

Gee, I know you might say that
you went on Facebook last week to criticize Ryan for bungling the “repeal and
replace” of Obamacare by proposing a scheme that managed to alienate both
right-wing and moderate Republicans as well as all Democrats. But that only
proves you are indeed a Russian disinformation agent! (Watts also claimed that
Sen. Rubio’s presidential bid “anecdotally suffered” from an online
Russian campaign against him.)

As Watts describes these
nefarious Russian schemes, they are so nefarious that they don’t have any
discernible earmarks or detectable predictability. In his view, the Russians
don’t want to help any particular person or group, just undermine America’s
faith in its democracy.

As Watts puts it, Russians
attack “people on both sides of the aisle … solely based on what they [the
Russians] want to achieve in their own landscape, whatever the Russian foreign
policy objectives are. They win because they play both sides.” In other words,
any political comment that an American might make might just prove that you’re
a traitor.

But Watts singled out
President Trump for special criticism because he supposedly has tweeted about
Russian-planted conspiracy theories. “Part of the reason active measures have
worked in this U.S. election is because the commander-in-chief has used Russian
active measure at times against his opponent,” Watts said, citing Trump’s bogus
claims about 2016 voter fraud and his earlier silliness about President Obama’s
Kenyan birthplace. Yes, as we all know, every goofy idea is manufactured in
Russia. Americans are incapable of developing their own nonsense.

Watts then suggested that some
kind of Ministry of Truth is needed to stamp out unapproved information. “Until
we get a firm basis on fact and fiction in our own country, … we’re going to
have a big problem,” Watts said. He warned of a dangerous future from Russian
information: “Somewhere in their cache right now there’s tremendous amounts of
information laying around they can weaponize against other Americans.”

Perhaps what is even more
frightening than the Russians letting Americans in on how Washington’s
political process really works – by somehow slipping WikiLeaks some evidence of
Democratic Party bigwigs tilting the Democratic primaries to ensure Clinton’s
nomination and revealing what Clinton told those Wall Street bankers – is the
idea that the U.S. government should be enlisted to enforce what Americans get
to see and hear.

The PropOrNot Smear

Watts and his alarums showed
up in another context in the weeks after the 2016 election when The
Washington Post ran a front-page story highlighting the claims by an
anonymous group, PropOrNot, which was pushing a blacklist of 200 Internet news
sites, including such independent sources of information as Counterpunch,
Truthdig, Naked Capitalism, Zero Hedge, Truth-out and Consortiumnews.

Though the Post granted
PropOrNot anonymity so it could safely slander independent-minded journalists,
the Post turned to Watts to bolster PropOrNot’s case. “They [the Russians] want
to essentially erode faith in the U.S. government or U.S. government
interests,” Watts said. “This was their standard mode during the Cold War. The
problem is that this was hard to do before social media.”

The Post then linked to an
article that Watts had co-authored entitled, “Trolling
for Trump: How Russia Is Trying to Destroy Our Democracy.” which, in
turn, cited as proof RT articles that mentioned Hillary Clinton’s health
problem last September (which was later acknowledged to be a bout with
pneumonia) and that discussed the vulnerabilities of the Federal Reserve (in an
age of escalating public and private debt). Both might seem to you like
reasonable topics for journalists, but you must understand that RT – because it
is Russian-sponsored – has become the favorite whipping boy of anyone trying to make
the case that America is besieged by Russian propaganda. And don’t you dare
mention that almost no one in America actually watches RT or you might end up
on PropOrNot’s list, too.

And, we know for sure that
you’re a Russian agent if you express any concern that the heightened tensions
between the U.S. and Russia might lead to nuclear war. As Watts and friends
write, “More recently, Moscow turned to stoking fears
of nuclear war between the United States and Russia” – and their
“proof” was a link not to RT but to the financial Web site, Zero Hedge, which
already had made it onto PropOrNot’s black list.

So, let’s see if we got this
right: We are not to worry our pretty little heads about nuclear war or a
future financial meltdown or police brutality toward racial minorities or race
relations in general or armed right-wing clashes with authorities or spying on
our Internet use or any government wrongdoing at all or even citizen protests
against that wrongdoing. Because if we debate such issues – if we even read
about such issues – we are playing into Vladimir Putin’s evil plans.

What Democracy?

Which makes me wonder what
kind of “democracy” these brave “defenders of democracy” have in mind. The New
York Times, The Washington Post and some establishment-approved Internet sites
already have begun work on establishing standards for what information the
American people will be allowed to see and hear – with disapproved sources of
news marginalized by Internet search engines or prevented from earning any
money by exclusion from Google and other ad programs.

Presumably, the 200 or so Web
sites on PropOrNot’s black list would be the first cut for the new Ministry of
Truth since many of them have published articles that raised questions about
the accuracy of claims made by the U.S. State Department or they have expressed
the belief that there may be two sides to complex issues – when Americans are
supposed to hear only the side that Official Washington wants them to hear.

Some of these “Russian
propaganda” Web sites – prior to the Iraq War – even raised doubts about the
U.S. government’s certainty that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of WMDs. Thank
goodness the Internet wasn’t as widely used back then or perhaps many Americans
would have doubted the truth-telling by The New York Times and The Washington
Post, which dutifully passed on the U.S. government’s pronouncements about
Hussein’s secret WMDs.

Surely, in 2002-03, the
Russians must have been behind the resistance by those few Web sites to the WMD
group think that all the respectable people just knew to be true. How else can
you explain the skepticism? And maybe Russia was responsible for the U.S.
government’s failure to find any of those WMD stockpiles. Curse you, Russia!

With the Senate Intelligence
Committee’s hearing on Thursday, this determination to squelch any dissenting
American views as “Russian disinformation” moved up a notch, beyond some
think-tank chatter, some newspaper articles or some initial planning for private-sector
censorship.

The craziness has now become
the focus of an official Senate investigation into Russian “meddling” in
American political life. We have taken another step down the path of a New Cold
War that blends a New McCarthyism with a New Orwellianism.

Investigative reporter Robert
Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and
Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen
Narrative, either in print
here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).